I’m going to make the (undoubtedly unpopular) argument that Thief is a pretty kittenty class in sPvP. Their only current effective role is burst, and while they can do it well, it makes the class horrifically predictable, and BORING to play. In any sort of organized play, your survival mechanic is either “Do a ton of damage and escape”, or “Hope someone more threatening than you is targeted, and there isn’t a ton of AoE going off between you and your target”.
There’s little point in playing S/D, S/P, P/D, or P/P. Sword mainhand can work to varying degrees, but its clearly not as powerful as Dagger mainhand. Without stealth, S/P loses access to ALL of a thief’s defensive traits, stealth in general, and has less burst. S/D has all the positional requirements and high Init costs of D/D, without any of the damage – sure, you can use the daze in a coordinated environment, but you’ll often find a nasty backstab followed by HS on a target being FFd works just as well in most situations, and is better generally as well. P/P is useless, and P/D is WAY too slow, predictable, and easily countered for tourney use, not to mention the spec relies on using stealth as much as possible, making it a sub-par choice for conquest play. On top of that, no immunity skill and generally poor defensive abilities outside of stealth make D/D or D/P the very, very clear choice. They’re predictable and pretty easily countered by any player with half a brain, so if you don’t seriously gimp your target on opening, its generally a downhill battle from there, IMO of course.
Let’s also mention that we have 2 utility lines that are generally acknowledged as underpowered – traps and venoms. Both need some serious tweaking to compete with our other utilities.
just lol. The only effective role you have may be burst, but good news, you do it extremely well. You have ways to reset fights, you have insane mobility allowing you to get to the top of structures in an instant, despite similar type skills not working like that for other professions and of course you have stealth. 2 useless utility lines you say? Engineer’s turrets and gadgets say hello. Should there be more diversity in builds? Yes, of course, for everyone. But the whole ‘thieves are kitten in PvP’ argument is just lol worthy. You’re pigeonholed, but you’re extremely good at the thing you’re pigeonholed into. Other professions wish they could say the same.
I freely admitted that thief burst is awesome – doesn’t make the class fun to play, or even well designed however. Everyone wants their class to be good at something, but its extremely boring when nearly every single fight you engage in goes the exact same way. There’s not much variation in “do as much damage as fast as possible, then run away if it isn’t dead.” It also doesn’t excuse how underpowered/poorly designed every other weaponset is compared to dagger mainhand, and how useless a thief becomes the second you take stealth away (seeing as there are 3 weaponset options with no access to stealth, this is a big deal). There’s also something to be said about predictability – play a thief for a few weeks, you’ll learn to predict what they’re next move is with a fair amount of accuracy.
I also never claimed that the thief’s broken utility lines were any more or less important than other classes (you used Engineer in your example), its just a fact – One I’m sure many other classes share. They should all be fixed, I’m just making the case for thief because I know them well enough to know what utilities are worthless via first hand experience.
You define kittenty as “Ineffective”. I define kittenty as “Makes the game boring”. Playing a build that handles nearly every situation identically, using only 1 or 2 of its weaponsets attacks because those are the only ones that are worth using and they’re leagues better than the other poorly designed options (In addition to only 1 or 2 of the possible weaponsets, because the others have glaring design issues), it gets old quick. I’m sure alot of classes would love to pigeonholed into burst…for the first few weeks. Being powerful is fun – playing a binary spec where nearly every fights outcome is determined in 5 seconds using the nigh same exact strategy isn’t (to me at least).
Ah ok, I misunderstood what you meant, my apologies. I see your point, and yeah, that does suck. Hopefully more viability can be brought to a variety of profs/trait lines.